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Cortex Plus Hacker's Guide
Crowdsourced & Crowdfunded
We asked creators, amateurs, and professionals alike to share new mechanics, settings, and entirely new games based on our popular Cortex Plus roleplaying games: LEVERAGE, SMALLVILLE, and MARVEL HEROIC ROLEPLAYING. An army of authors contributed their own ideas to the project, which we dubbed the Cortex Plus Hacker’s Guide. Emboldened by a highly successful Kickstarter project and the investment of over a thousand backers, the Guide has blossomed into a fully featured sourcebook for all things Cortex Plus!
We had an amazing team on this project led by Dave Chalker, Phillippe-Antoine Menard and Cam Banks. Contributors also include Lenny Balsera, Rob Donoghue, Dave Bozarth, Sally Christensen, Scott Cunningham, Steve Darlington, Anders Gabrielsson, Matthew Gardner, Zachery Gaskins, Jim Henley, Dain Lybarger, Tom Lynch, Ryan Macklin, Adam Minnie, James Ritter, Josh Roby, Elizabeth Shoemaker Sampat, Shreyas Sampat, Joel Shempert, Dennis Twigg, Amanda Valentine, Monica Valentinelli, and Filamena Young.
Cortex Plus … & YOU
The Cortex Plus Hacker’s Guide gives you articles, essays, and three complete reference documents to bring action, drama, and heroic fantasy to your game table. From science fiction to school yards, from the end of time to the outskirts of imagination, the building blocks of your next Cortex Plus game are right here!
We asked creators, amateurs, and professionals alike to share new mechanics, settings, and entirely new games based on our popular Cortex Plus roleplaying games: LEVERAGE, SMALLVILLE, and MARVEL HEROIC ROLEPLAYING. An army of authors contributed their own ideas to the project, which we dubbed the Cortex Plus Hacker’s Guide. Emboldened by a highly successful Kickstarter project and the investment of over a thousand backers, the Guide has blossomed into a fully featured sourcebook for all things Cortex Plus!
We had an amazing team on this project led by Dave Chalker, Phillippe-Antoine Menard and Cam Banks. Contributors also include Lenny Balsera, Rob Donoghue, Dave Bozarth, Sally Christensen, Scott Cunningham, Steve Darlington, Anders Gabrielsson, Matthew Gardner, Zachery Gaskins, Jim Henley, Dain Lybarger, Tom Lynch, Ryan Macklin, Adam Minnie, James Ritter, Josh Roby, Elizabeth Shoemaker Sampat, Shreyas Sampat, Joel Shempert, Dennis Twigg, Amanda Valentine, Monica Valentinelli, and Filamena Young.
Cortex Plus … & YOU
The Cortex Plus Hacker’s Guide gives you articles, essays, and three complete reference documents to bring action, drama, and heroic fantasy to your game table. From science fiction to school yards, from the end of time to the outskirts of imagination, the building blocks of your next Cortex Plus game are right here!
- GenresRole Playing Games
264 pages, ebook
First published July 1, 2013
1 person is currently reading
8 people want to read
About the author
Cam Banks
40 books49 followersI am an expatriate New Zealander who fell in love with an American and moved to the USA in 1996. We are now married and have two boys. I've fulfilled my lifelong dream to become a game designer and writer and after 22 years I've moved back to New Zealand with my family. I work for Fandom Tabletop as a creative director, leading the charge on new projects powered by the Cortex system that I have spent much of my career developing as a tabletop roleplaying game toolkit.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 17, 2013
I really like this book. I had heard a lot of buzz about the cortex+ system, yet was not attracted to the fiction that the branded games it supported were entrenched in (which include Marvel heroic Roleplaying Game, Smallville, Serenity Role Playing Game , and
Leverage the Roleplaying Game). This book gave me a chance to see a wealth of possibilities for the system in the absence of licensed content.
The name 'hacker's guide' stems in part from its presentation of the 3 cortex systems (Drama, Action and Heroic) alongside a series of other entries detailing possible settings and rules modifications or hacks. It functions very much like a do-it-yourself manual, encouraging you to mix and match the options that work best for you and your game table. As such, understand that you are not buying a game so much as a toolbox of possible games with some assembly required.
Another reason one might think of it as a hacker'g guide is that it was both crowd funded and crowd sourced with a boat-load of authors submitting material. The book comes off professional and consistent throughout with an elegant, if simple, layout and generally clear, concise writing backed by excellent editing.
The core mechanic uniting all of the material involves rolling a pool of polyhedral dice (including 4,6,8,10, and 12 sided dice), summing your two highest and comparing them against some difficultly number, perhaps static, or perhaps another pool of dice. The higher roll resolves the conflict in their favour. Each die in the pool represents something about your character, or her environment, that might help or hinder your efforts. The building of dice pools can be a very narrative process, one that engages player and GM creativity. I consider this one of its strongest contributions. If I had to identify one feature I found challenging about this system, however, it would be how opaque the change in probability of success is as dice pools grow or shrink. I prefer when a player has at reasonably clear idea of their chance of success before they roll the dice. Cortex+ makes this extremely difficult at the table.
The system enforces an egalitarian distribution of story authority through its use of plot points. Plot points, in addition to offering certain set mechanical benefits, can be used to establish narrative control in certain contexts and allow everyone to collaboratively push the story forward.
Those familiar with the Fate Core System will see clear similarities. This is perhaps unsurprising given the overlap in authorship between the two systems. Nonetheless, it does feel like a very different game and I think fans of either system would enjoy reading the other.
Overall, I really liked reading this book and am excited to try this game out.
Leverage the Roleplaying Game). This book gave me a chance to see a wealth of possibilities for the system in the absence of licensed content.
The name 'hacker's guide' stems in part from its presentation of the 3 cortex systems (Drama, Action and Heroic) alongside a series of other entries detailing possible settings and rules modifications or hacks. It functions very much like a do-it-yourself manual, encouraging you to mix and match the options that work best for you and your game table. As such, understand that you are not buying a game so much as a toolbox of possible games with some assembly required.
Another reason one might think of it as a hacker'g guide is that it was both crowd funded and crowd sourced with a boat-load of authors submitting material. The book comes off professional and consistent throughout with an elegant, if simple, layout and generally clear, concise writing backed by excellent editing.
The core mechanic uniting all of the material involves rolling a pool of polyhedral dice (including 4,6,8,10, and 12 sided dice), summing your two highest and comparing them against some difficultly number, perhaps static, or perhaps another pool of dice. The higher roll resolves the conflict in their favour. Each die in the pool represents something about your character, or her environment, that might help or hinder your efforts. The building of dice pools can be a very narrative process, one that engages player and GM creativity. I consider this one of its strongest contributions. If I had to identify one feature I found challenging about this system, however, it would be how opaque the change in probability of success is as dice pools grow or shrink. I prefer when a player has at reasonably clear idea of their chance of success before they roll the dice. Cortex+ makes this extremely difficult at the table.
The system enforces an egalitarian distribution of story authority through its use of plot points. Plot points, in addition to offering certain set mechanical benefits, can be used to establish narrative control in certain contexts and allow everyone to collaboratively push the story forward.
Those familiar with the Fate Core System will see clear similarities. This is perhaps unsurprising given the overlap in authorship between the two systems. Nonetheless, it does feel like a very different game and I think fans of either system would enjoy reading the other.
Overall, I really liked reading this book and am excited to try this game out.
Displaying 1 of 1 review